Up-scale stores and eating establishments regularly make available snack and dessert items which are quite exepnsive, both for the customer to buy and for the merchant to stock. The term "bakery product" as used herein is intended to mean any circularly-shaped comestible that is intended to be divided into individual wedge-shaped portions. Examples are various mousse pies, cakes of complicated formulation and construction, and occasionally even ice cream products.
Most frequently the bakery product is first sold as an entire unsliced article. Then its division into individual portions is done by servers, who wield a knife and spatula for the purpose. It seems that the merchant loses at least one portion of each article because of clumsiness of the server, especially in removing the first portion, or because of failure accurately to divide the article, or because of the quietly willful spoilage that gives the server a slice to eat or to share, because it is not in good enough condition to sell after it has been removed from the article.
There has been proposed a slicer which utilizes a blade to force folded pieces of wax paper into the article at accurately spaced-apart locations. These are inserted while the article is in a softly frozen condition. The portions can readily be removed and the wax paper discarded, and every slice is perfect. In fact, in many operations the article is shipped with these inserts already in place. The servers no longer need to exercise any judgement or special care. One such machine is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,565,053 issued to Browne et al on Jan. 21, 1986, which is incorporated herein in its entirety for its showing of the general concept of such a machine.
The said machine has enjoyed a substantial acceptance. It incorporates a turntable which rotates beneath a knife blade that extends across a diameter of the turntable. A folded sheet of waxed paper is doubled over the lower end of the blade. When the blade is pressed into the article, it is shielded by the paper, and serves both to part the article and to force the paper into the article at the part. The paper remains in place after the blade is removed. The blade moves only up and down. To make successive cuts, the turntable is indexed through an appropriate angle and then stopped, and the blade again is pressed into the article. Obviously, the correct indexing of the article is critical to the correct function of the device. An indexing mechanism is part of the machine shown in the said Browne patent.
Food machinery of this class must meet some requirements that are not commonly confronted. For example, in Class A bakery operations, it is necessary for the mechanism to withstand very hot water or steam for clean up. Also, the same machine must be adaptable to divide articles into various numbers of portions, which numbers must be selectable. The skills of the operators of such machinery are widely variable, and it is therefore important for the selection means to be simple in concept and manipulation. It is an object of this invention to meet those objectives.